In 1970, a Stanford psychologist put a marshmallow in front of a four-year-old and told them they could have two marshmallows if they could wait 15 minutes.
Most kids caved.
Researchers spent years calling it a problem of "willpower." Turns out the kids who waited had simply been around adults who modeled patience as a skill — something you practice, not something you're born with.
School districts keep running a version of this experiment on first-year teachers. They load them up with content knowledge, hand them a "marshmallow" (aka credential), and send them into a classroom with a "good luck!" They are banking on willpower to carry them through the moments nobody prepared them for.
One of our Subject Virtual School teachers, also an expert in educator development, has spent 20 years in California public education watching that play out in slow motion. The fix, she says, starts with a mentor willing to say "I have no idea how this is going to go" out loud, in front of actual students.
Smart, prepared, and still drowning
Roughly half of all new teachers leave the profession within their first five years. Districts have spent enormous energy trying to solve this with better onboarding materials, stronger content prep, and more structured mentoring check-ins.
The aforementioned educator and expert mentored new teachers through district induction programs and supervised student teachers at the classroom level. She thinks the profession is continually treating the symptom while missing the cause.
The real issue, she says, runs deeper than content gaps. Teachers arrive in classrooms terrified of being exposed as someone who doesn't know enough.
"Theres's a lot of anxiety and fear coming from the younger teachers I've worked with. They're nervous about standing up and being an authority on something."
Teacher prep programs load new teachers up with curriculum knowledge and classroom management theory. What these programs haven't figured out how to teach is the psychological experience of walking into a room, being wrong in front of 30 teenagers, and surviving it with your authority intact.
The cost of getting this wrong is concrete. Replacing a teacher runs between $4,000 in rural districts and over $20,000 in urban ones. When new teachers don't get the right support in their first years, they leave. And the profession keeps paying for it.